ERNST CASSIRER LANGUAGE AND MYTH SERIES OF WIDELY

ISBN 978-9-4 (cloth : alk. Pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. English The Warburg years (19191933) : essays on language, art, myth, and technology / Ernst Cassirer translated and with an introduction by S.G. Cassirer, Ernst, 18741945.

From 1935 to 1941 he held a post in Sweden then there were four years in America, at Yale and Columbia. He was prescient in getting out of Germany in 1933, and lucky in heading to Oxford and not Paris. He spent the rest of his life working out a synthesis able to contain the two cultures.

Ernst Cassirer Language And Myth Series Of Widely

Courier Corporation, Philosophy - 103 pages. Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Alfred Cassirer. He is particularly adamant in the claim that. There was no poker on hand in Davos, although most then and since seem to think that Cassirer was at the wrong end of the philosophical stick.Among the symbolic forms that Cassirer addresses are language, science, myth, religion, history, and art. In 1929 he had had a spat with Heidegger at Davos, an event that achieved the sort of notoriety among the tribe of philosophers that Wittgenstein later earned by lifting a poker in the direction (perhaps) of Popper at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club. Along the way he wrote a series of widely respected books aimed at both specialist and general readers, and earned the personal esteem and intellectual discipleship of a number of his academic colleagues in the New World.

As so often, the philosophical and the political-ideological questions overlap. Is it just coincidence that an intellectual biography and a volume of conference proceedings have just been published by two American presses, or are we anglophones about to rediscover Cassirer?There are problems. A liberal cosmopolitan German Jew offering to bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic culture, Skidelsky speculates, is just what the world (or at least Germany) thinks it needs.

It was important in the development of psychoanalysis. The symbol has often defined that which is of great importance but a bit ineffable, or that which is so readily apparent as to seem trite. To be sure this has not prevented the subsequent evolution of symbolic anthropology, symbolic action, symbolic interaction sociology and symbolic logic, but efforts to make precise and telling use of the term вЂsymbolвЂ™ have always been hindered by its commonplace sense as meaning anything at all that stands for something else, especially when the relationship between symbol and referent is merely self-evident, or portentous in the murkiest of ways. This is more obvious now than it would have been in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Cassirer was making his way in the academy, but even then the affiliation might have been expected to conjure up something either hopelessly vague or uncomfortably religiose. Any young philosopher setting out to establish a career would be well advised to think twice before making a committed intellectual investment in the symbol.

It infuses the temporal with the eternal. It is a living, breathing thing that sustains and nourishes, an organic component of the thing it also stands for. There is nothing arbitrary about it. This is the tradition that Coleridge invoked in proposing the symbol as the highest form of representation, one misunderstood in that age (he was writing in 1816) as made up merely of abstract notions and picture language: the symbol is marked by a вЂtranslucenceвЂ™ of the whole in the part, and by its subsistence as вЂa living part in that Unity, of which it is the representativeвЂ™. The symbolic is a major category for Lacan, but there has been no dispelling of the mists gathered around the term.The murkiness associated with the symbol comes from its religious application, first of all (and this came very early) in its sense as a binding statement ( symbolum) of Christian belief вЂ“ the performance of a creed or confession вЂ“ and then as the avowal of an immaterial presence in a material form, as in the bread and wine of the communion. The radical Freud most of us read today was less interested than Jung in the idea of a collective unconscious, but the historical Freud dallied with it in his discussions of the symbol, especially after 1914, finding common ground between dreams and myths, legends, folk tales and linguistic idioms.

Paul de Man captured the spirit of an age in his claim that the Romantic preference for symbol over allegory, accepted as a truism by generations of literary historians, had to be understood as a вЂtenacious self-mystificationвЂ™ that sought to keep at bay temporality and irony, the signatures of an allegorical mode that refuses the consolations of transcendence and eternity. Walter Benjamin, in The Origin s of German Tragic Drama, took issue with a notion of the symbol that he saw as debased because it was no longer a theological complex of material and transcendental elements but just вЂa relationship between appearance and essenceвЂ™, shedding a вЂsentimental twilight over the philosophy of beauty which has become more and more impenetrable since the end of early romanticismвЂ™. There is no redundancy: everything is connected.But allegory has had its defenders, and arguably they have been the winners in the past centuryвЂ™s intellectual disputes about representation. Allegory is for him secondary, metaphysically impotent and trivial in comparison to the ever expanding moral and intellectual energy of the symbol, which ultimately expresses nothing less than the indwelling of the divine in the human and of every life in the one life.

Allegory tells us that it is artificial, and that any effort to have it taken for reality belongs in the domains of rhetoric and ideology. Allegory, in other words, fronts its identity as a sign, subject to the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified which Saussure made famous, and which has been at the core of the range of theoretical initiatives called structuralism and post-structuralism. In the allegorical mode one is always conscious of the act of representation: it is so disjunctively visible as to fool no one. De Man opens up but does not develop the point that allegoryвЂ™s commitment to time and its refusal of transcendence make it the proper vehicle for a politics.

For Kant, the symbol functions in the realm of analogy, implying not a similarity between things but between sets of relations: no objective knowledge is involved. Steering a course between abstractionism and empiricism, Cassirer explores a genetic paradigm that does not intend or promise an end to history, but offers instead a principle of convergence that he would soon extend beyond the natural and mathematical sciences and into the world of culture and our knowledge of it, the world of Geisteswissenchaft.CassirerвЂ™s major publications of the 1920s are the ones in which this transition is effected: the three volumes translated into English (much later) as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, dealing respectively with language, myth and scientific knowledge. He was not, in other words, a Hegelian, but he did propose that the world-structuring concepts of the understanding are evolutionary, and that they might thereby underwrite not only a progressive model of the natural sciences but one that was in harmony with mathematical logic.

Partly because of this, associating the beautiful with the good can take place вЂwithout too violent a leapвЂ™. He does however say that the apprehension of the symbol suggests some вЂunknownвЂ™ ( unbekannte) connection between the theoretical and the practical spheres, and that such a connection is often implicit in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things so a tree may be вЂmajesticвЂ™ or fields вЂjoyfulвЂ™. He does not say that one leads to the other. When he writes that вЂthe beautiful is the symbol of the morally good,вЂ™ he means that the one relates to the other by way of a set of analogies: as the one pleases immediately, so does the other as the one assumes a universality it can never (and need not) prove, so does the other, and so on. Kant more or less clearly forbids this sort of connection.